True Hallucinations Part 9

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

A SAUCER FULL OF SECRETS.

In which we plan our departure, I encounter a flying saucer, and theories sprout like mushrooms as we return to Berkeley.

The ELEVENTH OF MARCH was a full moon. It pa.s.sed uneventfully enough after the adventure of Dennis and the mission bell, meaning that I can now recollect little of what happened. I remained ecstatic, certain that all was for the best, certain that some definitive tipping of the hand by the thing we were dealing with was about to occur.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Ev walked out from the river house to see me. She invited me to return with her to the river and for all of us to have dinner together. She showed the strain of what we had all been going through. There was no doubt that whatever had happened was pus.h.i.+ng us to the limit of what we could a.s.similate without wanting to move against it. As we walked back across the pasture, the atmosphere seemed to be even more alive and active than usual, with sp.a.w.ning clouds and drifting mist. Ev pointed to the southeast, where a black, stratoc.u.mulus ma.s.s was seething and boiling up to great alt.i.tudes. We watched for a few

moments, and it became like a vast mushroom cloud-the aftermath of a thermonuclear blast. The impression was very startling, and Ev recalled to me Dennis's words with regard to Stropharia cubensis. He said that it was the mushroom at the end of history. To him the shape of the atomic cloud was a physical and biophysical pun on the transformative powers of the Strophariad and its eruption into human history.

As we watched, suddenly Ev gasped. From the seething base of the cloud what looked like a column of light emerged. The column was sustained, not merely a bolt of lightning.

It was hard to see how it could be a shaft of sunlight, since it was late afternoon and the sun was in the west, while the cloud was in the southeast. We watched it for perhaps a minute. Then it stopped abruptly. Ev was quite shaken. Even more than the frozen appearance of the river, this occurrence was of an empirical order different than anything that she had experienced at La Chorrera.

Arriving at the riverside campfire we learned that Vanessa had been up at the mission with Father Jose Maria talking on the radio to the bush pilot who had whisked Dave from our midst. The pilot was willing to follow Vanessa's intent and think of us as a low-grade emergency. He promised to return in a few days to fly us out. I was unhappy with these arrangements. I knew that we, the gringo strangers, would lose face with the local people when our need for this airlift became known. Also, I did not have Vanessa's faith that all Dennis needed to return to normal was to check into the world of modern psychiatry. But there was nothing to be done for it, and so we dined in silence, each lost in unshared thoughts.

The next day we were to pack all our equipment and move it to the river in preparation for a flight that could come unannounced at any time. Already we were preparing to withdraw from the vortex at La Chorrera.

The evening's only moment of humor was provided by Ev's animated description of Dennis evading Vanessa's wardens.h.i.+p and slipping away from the river house sometime during the previous night to go and sit quietly in the house of some Colombian colonistas, who awoke to find him there as una.s.suming as a piece of furniture. As the story died away, the unspoken dimensions of it returned to move in each of our minds.

The next day was March 13. The camp in the forest, the hallowed-seeming spot where the transforming experiment had occurred, was dismantled. All the artifacts that set it apart from dozens of other Witoto huts were tucked away, and it was returned to its native anonymity. Outside, in a pile, we left quite a cargo trove behind us, for our forced evacuation by airplane left precious little room for any gear; some insect and plant specimens would leave with us, the cameras, the notebooks on the experiment-that was it. The things that we left would be swiftly a.s.similated by the tolerant Witotos who owned the site of our attempted probe of hyper-s.p.a.ce.

We were all installed in the river house ready to go with the airplane whenever it should appear. Everything seemed to be moving forward of its own accord. We swam in the river and sat on the rocks, scanning the sky and listening for the drone of the little amphibian. Thus the afternoon pa.s.sed, with even Dennis quiet after an episode in the early morning in which he had methodically thrown the contents of his room out the window to the point of ripping out the window frame and hurling it after everything else.

Around four o'clock, I was lying on the river bank about twenty feet back from the river's edge. I was thinking about a walk to the river I had taken two days before, when each step nearer the water seemed to bring more rhyme and rhythm into my thoughts. From out of nowhere I remembered an old Celtic saying that Robert Graves discusses: "Poetry is made at the edge of running water." My recent experience at water's edge had something to do with that, I believed, and I was pondering it. Vanessa and Ev were was.h.i.+ng in front of me at the river bank. Directly across the river from us was the southeastern sky in which Ev and I had seen the cloud with the shaft of light just twenty- four hours earlier.

I was gazing in that direction when I noticed what I thought was the weak beginning of a rainbow, a place low in the sky near the horizon where there seemed to be the faint touch of a spectrum. After a few seconds, I called down to the two women and asked if they saw a rainbow across the river. They glanced across the river for only a moment and said that they saw nothing. I did not persist, but instead watched the sky in that spot. By this time, I had stopped forcing my opinions on people. I was already

regarded as nuts, not incoherent exactly, but not to be trusted or relied upon because I believed such odd things. That was my flaw.

I kept watching across the river and I saw the thing intensify. I became extraordinarily interested. In this pastoral setting, it seemed to me that a great revelation was brewing. I watched and I saw the colors deepen; the bow of a rainbow never formed, but the deepening of the colors in one spot was very definite. Again I inquired of the women if they saw the rainbow across the river. Again the light glance. And? Wonderful!

"Yes, we see it. Not much of one is it?"

The clue-scanning part of my hyperactive imagination was upon this detail in an instant.

Yes, first a cloud with a shaft of light; now a spot of spectrogrammatic color in the same spot in the sky. I had the strong sense of the eye-in-the-sky drawing close to my thoughts and watching with satisfaction as I understood the importance of the southeast, and of watching and focusing my attention on that spot. In my mind, the teacher said, "This is the place. This is the sign. Watch here."

I said nothing to anyone, but I formed the resolve to not spend that sleepless night as I had spent the others: wandering the fields like the fox-spirit or meditating at the chorro.

Rather I would sit here where the lake emptied and the Igara-Parana resumed its languid course. Here at the boat landing, seventy feet down a steep mud bank from the river house, I would sit through the night and watch.

And so, all night long, I sat reviewing the things that had pa.s.sed, seeming to divide my consciousness and send it both backward through my family tree and forward into the future. I seemed to see all the years still ahead; I saw some technique emerging from this contact, our careers pursued across s.p.a.ce and time, and finally vindication as the world realized the truth of the transdimensional nature of the Stropharia visions and the true nearness of the worlds that they had thrown open. For it had become my belief that the contact with an intelligent and utterly alien species was beginning

for humanity. It seemed that out of the long night of cosmic time the novelty of novelties, the moment of contact between minds on utterly different planes, was beginning.

We were among the first to achieve contact with this Other species. It was the real thing.

We had come to the equatorial jungle to explore the dimensions glimpsed in tryptamine ecstasy, and there, in the darkness of the heart of the Amazon, we had been found and touched by this bizarre and ancient life form that was now awakening to the global potential of a symbiotic relations.h.i.+p with technical humanity. All night long strange vistas and insights poured through me. I saw gigantic machineries and worlds of vegetable and mechanical forms on scales inconceivably vast. Time, agatized and glittering, seemed to pour by me like living super-fluids inhabiting dream regions of terrible pressure and super cold. And I saw the plan, the mighty plan. At last. It was an ecstasy, an ecstasis that lasted hours and placed the seal of completion on all of my previous life. At the end I felt reborn, but as what I knew not.

In the gray of a false dawn, the wave of internal imagery faded away. I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched. The sky was clear, but it was still very early and stars were still s.h.i.+ning dimly in the west. In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention had been focused, the sky was clear except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon only a few feet above the tree tops on the other side of the river, perhaps a half mile away. As I stretched and stood up on the flat stone where I had been sitting, I noticed that the line of fog seemed to have grown darker, and now seemed to be churning or rolling in place. I watched very carefully as the rolling line of darkening mist split into two parts and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart. It took only a minute or so for these changes to be executed, and I was now looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size lying in a row and slightly above the horizon, only a half mile or so away. A wave of excitement swept through me followed by a wave of definite fear. I was glued to the spot, unable to move, as in a dream.

As I watched, the clouds recoalesced in the same way that they had divided apart, taking another few minutes. The symmetry of this dividing and rejoining, and the fact that the smaller clouds were all the same size, lent the performance an eerie air, as if nature

herself were suddenly the tool of some unseen organizing agency. As the clouds recoalesced, they seemed to grow even darker and more opaque. As they all became one, the cloud seemed to swirl inward like a tornado or waterspout, and it flashed into my mind that perhaps it was a waterspout-something I still have never seen. But even as the thought formed, I heard a high-pitched, ululating whine come drifting over the jungle tree tops, obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching.

I turned and gave one glance at the river house seventy feet behind me and up the steep hill, gauging whether I had time to run and awaken someone to get confirmation of what was happening. To arouse someone I would have had to go hand-over-hand up the slope and consequently take my eyes off the thing I was watching. In the s.p.a.ce of an instant, I decided that I could not cease observing. I tried a shout, but no sound came from my fear- constricted throat.

The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch, and in fact, everything seemed to be speeding up. The moving cloud was definitely growing larger rapidly, moving straight toward the place where I was. I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly. For the first time, I truly believed in all that had happened to us, and I knew that the flying concrescence was now about to take me. Its details seemed to solidify as it approached.

Then it pa.s.sed directly overhead at an alt.i.tude of about two hundred feet, banked steeply upward, and was lost from sight over the edge of the slope behind me. In the last moment before it was lost, I completely threw open my senses to it and saw it very clearly. It was a saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly, with un.o.btrusive, soft, blue and orange lights.

As it pa.s.sed over me I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside. It was making the whee, whee, whee sound of science fiction flying saucers.

My emotions were all in a jumble. At first I was terrified, but the moment I knew that whatever was in the sky was not going to take me, I felt disappointment. I was amazed and I was trying to remember what I had seen as clearly as possible. Was it real in the naive sense in which that question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs? No one else saw this thing as far as I know. I alone was its observer. I believe that had there been other observers, they would have seen

essentially what I have reported, but as for "real," who can say? I saw this thing go from being a bit of cloud to being a rivet-studded aircraft of some kind. Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft? Was it a hallucination? Against my testimony can be put my admitted lack of sleep and our involvement with psychedelic plants. Yet curiously this last point can be interpreted in my favor. I am familiar through direct experience with every known cla.s.s of hallucinogen. What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery I am familiar with.

Yet also against my testimony is the inevitable incongruous detail that seems to render the whole incident absurd. It is that as the saucer pa.s.sed overhead, I saw it clearly enough to judge that it was identical with the UFO, with three half-spheres on its underside, that appears in an infamous photo by George Adamski widely a.s.sumed to be a hoax. I had not closely followed the matter, but I accepted the expert opinion that what Adamski had photographed was a rigged up end-cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But I saw this same object in the sky above La Chorrera. Was it a fact picked up as a boyhood UFO enthusiast? Something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have been? My stereotyped, but already debunked, notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky. By appearing in a form that casts doubt on itself, it achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.

It was, if you ask me-and there is no one else really that one can ask-either a holographic mirage of a technical perfection impossible on earth today or it was the manifestation of something which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine, but which could have appeared in any form, a manifestation of a humorous something's omniscient control over the world of form and matter. It was not a mirage of the conventional sort. Years later it occurs to me that perhaps it was a kind of mirage still unknown to us-a temporal mirage. The ordinary mirage is an inverted image of water or a distant place. The cause is the distortion of light by alternate levels of hot and cold air. Outside Benares, in India, I saw a triple image of the city suspended over the surface of the Ganges River. But a temporal mirage is another matter; it is a lenticular image of

a distant time and place. Cause unknown. What makes the ordinary and temporal mirages members of the same cla.s.s is that both types of mirages require the intercession of the human mind in order to exist. Certain areas of the world have local conditions which make them mirage p.r.o.ne; might the same be true of temporal mirages? Or perhaps the temporal mirage is a natural phenomenon, and the UFO is an artifact resulting from the temporal mirage being used or experimented with by some future technology?

I believe that this latter comes close to the mark. The UFO is a reflection of a future event that promises humanity's eventual mastery over time, s.p.a.ce, and matter. We, in our clumsy attempt to probe these mysteries, were able to coax nature into throwing out this great, burning scintilla of pure contradiction from the dark retort where she labors over the chemistry of the millennium. That we were able to do this is full of import. It meant to me that we were on the right track; the Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity.

At La Chorrera I had only the isolated personal conviction that our approach would be vindicated; now, as our ideas are finding a small community that share these intuitions, I am yet more sure that the answer to all of the mysteries that disequilibrate our view of the world are to be understood by looking within ourselves. When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.

The UFO encounter marked for me the culmination of our work at La Chorrera. My contact with the saucer took place at dawn on the fourteenth of March. The following morning at eleven, March 15, the airplane arrived, unannounced but not unexpected.

Vanessa had been antic.i.p.ating it for three days. It was a matter of a

few moments to clamber aboard after saying farewell to the priests and the police, all of whom had been most patient with our colorful party and its unusual preoccupations. Only in visions had my eyes recently rested on stuff such as the little airplane was made of- the highly polished, acrylic surfaces of machines and things impervious to hard, ultraviolet radiation; what the people of Amazonas call "machete skin." It was a reminder of all that we were returning to.

Dennis was on his best behavior. Beyond his commenting as we got aboard that an airplane was a partial condensation of a flying saucer, he said little. A roar of the engine, a hard pull back on the stick, and we and our legendary bush pilot were airborne. We circled the mission once before settling down to follow the Rio Igara-Parana back to the Rio Putumayo and the version of civilization that the town of Leticia would afford. What a tiny world La Chorrera is, left behind in the trackless jungle after only a glimpse of buildings and Zebu cattle resting in the green pastures, looking like lumps of melting, vanilla ice cream. I imagined that whatever we had touched and been touched by, it was now falling behind us.

We stayed two days in Leticia, days in which Dennis showed marked improvement while the rest of us drifted into various stances of distance with regard to each other. This seemed to be compensation for the excessive intimacy our isolated expedition had made necessary. The oddest thing about Leticia was that we were hardly off the plane before we ran into Jack and Ruby, an American couple who had rented Ev's apartment in Bogota for a few weeks. I had thought the name combination weird when I met them six weeks before, and now the fact that they were practically awaiting us in Leticia heightened the strangeness. I could not quite get my mind around it.

By the time we reached Bogota, Dennis had almost completely returned to normal, lending weight to the idea that some form of temporary chemical imbalance had been responsible for his reaction rather than the emergence of a chronically unbalanced personality structure. He was very shaky and very b.u.mmed by any mention of fourth- dimensional superconducting bonds, ayahuasca, or shamanism. He said, "Look, I have had it." He had, too.

He was nearly normal, but I was just at the beginning of a years-long period of unusual ideation-the state of suspended disbelief that gave birth to the ideas concerning time set out in The Invisible Landscape.

On the twentieth of March, there was general agreement that Dennis was totally back with us. It was an occasion of great happiness and we celebrated at one of Bogota's finest restaurants. It was an immense accomplishment to have been able to allow the reversal to work itself out without the aggravating influence of modern mental health care procedures. The ordeal in the wilderness that all shamans must face had been endured. A step on the path to knowledge had been taken.

On March 21, I made a journal entry-the first in weeks and the only one that I was able to make for another couple of months. I said this: March 21, 1971 It is now seventeen days since March fourth and the concretizing of the ampersand. If I have more or less correctly understood this phenomenon, then tomorrow, the eighteenth day, will mark some sort of half-way point in this experience. I predict that tomorrow Dennis will return to the psychological set he experienced prior to March first, though it is possible that rather than a residual amnesia concerning events at La Chorrera he will have instead a growing understanding of the experiment of which he was the creator. The past weeks have been harrowing and seemingly made of so many times, places, and minds that a rational chronicle has been impossible. Only Finnegans Wake gives some idea of the reality of the paradoxic.u.m as we experienced it by virtue of being able to pierce beyond time's double face. In spite of earlier misunderstandings and mis- projections concerning the cycles of time and number operating within the phenomenon, I now believe that in these seventeen days we have experienced, albeit sometimes running backwards and certainly enormously condensed, enough of a full cycle to begin to foresee in some dim sense the events of the next twenty or so days and have some idea of the approximate nature and direction of the opus.

This journal entry makes clear that while Dennis was recovering from his submergence in the t.i.tanic struggle I was quite in the grip of a struggle of my own. I was caught up in an obsessive immersion, almost an enforced meditation, on the nature of time. The ordinary concerns of ordinary life ceased to matter to me. My attention was entirely claimed by my efforts to build a new model of what time really is. Resonances, recurrences, and the idea that events were interference patterns caused by other events temporally and causally distant claimed my attention. In those early speculations I imagined a mythic cycle needing forty days to be brought to completion. It was only later, when I began to be impressed with the DNA-related and calendrical nature of the temporal cycles, that I turned my attention to cycles of sixty-four days duration. This speculation eventually led me to turn to the / Ching. In those early notions of a forty-day cycle of alchemical redemption there is only the slightest hint of the eventual theory in its operational details; yet the intent is clearly the same. Resonances, interference patterns, and fractal regresses of times within times-these were the materials that I began to build with. Eventually, after some years of work, the result would have a certain elegance. However, that elegance was reserved for the future; the early conception was crude, self-referential, and idiosyncratic. It was only my faith that it could be made coherent and rational to others that kept me at it for those several years, transforming the original intuition into a set of formal propositions.

The end of March was mostly spent in Bogota, a dreary time. The urban frenzy of a teeming, modern city did not rest lightly on our jungle-sensitive perceptions. Dennis seemed quite normal, though weakened and sobered. There were no messages from Dave, and Vanessa finally returned to the States. On the twenty-ninth, Dennis followed her example and flew to Colorado. I insisted that Ev and I go to southern Colombia so that I could have some time to reflect. This we did. I reviewed the whole incident at La Chorrera with no new insights and concluded that some sort of psychic gravity was pulling us home. On the thirteenth of April, one day short of a month after my encounter with the UFO, we arrived in Berkeley.

It was a short and difficult visit. I was beginning to see the dim outlines of what would become the / Ching time-wave theory. The

first maps of the / Ching hexagram hierarchy, which was eventually turned into a computer software program I called Timewave Zero, were done at that time. I kept myself away from people. I was totally immersed in my work; I had no interest or patience for anything else. I was in the grip of a creative mania more extreme than any I had thought possible. Each conversation with someone on these matters seemed to open vast gulfs of misunderstanding.

The most grotesque of these incidents involved my effort to obtain feedback concerning our ideas from what I thought of as "real experts." This misguided notion found me, one perfect day in May, inside the Donnor Laboratory of Virology and Bacteriology on the University of California campus at Berkeley. Earlier I had made an appointment to see Dr. Gunther Stent, the world-cla.s.s molecular geneticist and author of the The Molecular Chemistry of the Gene. I didn't know at the time that Stent was a legend for his Scandinavian rect.i.tude or that he fancied himself quite the Renaissance man and social philosopher. A year or two later he would publish a book advocating a reform of global society with the traditional social models of Samoa as an ideal goal.

I found the great man in his lab whites in a room filled with bubbling gla.s.sware and adoring grad students. I was shooed out of the lab, and an underling ushered me into his private office looking west over the campus toward the Golden Gate Bridge miles away.

From that ninth-floor vantage point, the spring crop of students were reduced to ant-like scurryings on the greensward below. Gunther Stent joined me a few minutes later.

Austere and balding, he settled back in his chair while I launched into the ideas behind the experiment at La Chorrera. I tried to begin gently, but I was overawed and very nervous. After a few minutes, I sensed that he might be calculating the odds of whether I would physically attack him. To his credit, he seemed to fight back this alarming swarm of thoughts, allowing me to ramble on and on. His face became utterly impa.s.sive as I became more and more uncertain of the direction in which the conversation was headed.

Finally, after a particularly long and outlandish burst of speculation through which he remained utterly unreadable, I decided to try to bring the matter to a head.

"Dr. Stent, my concern in coming here to discuss this with you is simply that I would like to know whether this theory has any validity or is simply fallacious." He seemed to soften slightly and left his position behind the desk to join me in looking westward through the thick, tinted gla.s.s. With a sigh of resignation that was heart sinking to his visitor he turned to me and spoke.

"My dear young friend, these ideas are not even fallacious."

My chagrin was bottomless and I fled, dizzy with embarra.s.sment. So much for my bridge building efforts toward normal science.

Encounters such as that convinced me that I had to relearn epistemology, genetics, philosophy of science-the entire gamut of subjects necessary to discuss the areas for which I now had such compelling concern. As my study of the / Ching, or Book of Change, advanced, I had refined the idea that its structure was the basis of a timewave or waves. These waves are discrete periods of change that follow each other as well as enclose each other. I came to realize that the internal logic of the timewaves strongly implied a termination of normal time and an end to ordinary history. At that point, the idea of concrescent psycho-matter and the UFO that I had encountered at La Chorrera became identified in my mind with each other and with the end of time scenarios of the Western religious traditions.

The early unquantified time chart was full of coincidences relative to my own personal life. In particular, the termination points of each component section of the wave seemed to have special meaning for me. Positioning one of these points on the experiment at La Chorrera seemed to make other points in the past (the death of my mother and my meeting with Ev), and points then in the future (my twenty-fifth birthday), especially important. I saw that important events in my own life seemed to be occurring every sixty- four days with eerie regularity. It was necessary to work these ideas out alone, since my intensity concerning them and their paradoxical nature looked absurd in the eyes of other people. I understood that whether or not the effect I was exploring was a general phenomenon in nature or a unique idiosyncrasy, it was obviously vitally important

for me, personally, to let the forces I had become entangled with play themselves out to the end.

Bizarre as the plan seemed to others, I resolved to return to La Chorrera, to its solitude and its strangeness, and to spend time there simply and calmly observing the thing that had come over me. Ev and I had bought emeralds as one of our last acts before leaving Colombia and the sale of these was more than enough to finance our return to the surreal domain of sunlight, forests, and rivers that had sp.a.w.ned my obsession. Once back at La Chorrera, I was determined to write down all that had overtaken us; that was my resolve, and much of the early draft of The Invisible Landscape was the result. This decision to depart California was hailed by my circle in Berkeley. Concern for my mental state was rife among my friends, and rumor had reached us that the FBI was aware that I was somewhere back inside the country and had begun looking for me. The Bombay-to- Aspen has.h.i.+sh blues were catching up with me. It was, as they say, time to make a move.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

RETURN.

In which Ev and I return alone to La Chorrera and a new comet heads toward the earth.

On THE FIFTEENTH of July, Ev and I again stood on the edge of the Amazon interior.

My intention to return to La Chorrera was fast becoming fact. My journal takes up again as we started down the Rio Putumayo, a name that by then suggested to me an etymology like "the wh.o.r.e of illusion": July 15, 1971 Having left the vicinity of Puerto Leguizamo a few hours ago with our cargo of beer and cattle, Ev and I are once again enclosed by and moving through the dream that is the forests and rivers of the Amazon Basin. This return to continue the contemplation of the phenomenon in the pure medium of tropical nature in which we discovered it marks a dedication to and an immersion in the phenomenon that, I imagine, anyone familiar with the events which overtook us in March finds incredible and even perhaps not without an element of risk.

I refer not to danger inherent in the jungle or to the inevitable hards.h.i.+ps attendant upon travel in remote areas, but rather to the psychological stress inherent in confronting the phenomenon-

strangely so much a part of one's self and yet vast and other--away from the mitigating world of friends and a world that is unaware or skeptical concerning our encounter with the phenomenon and the subsequent understanding which we derived from it. My first consideration in this area is to do all in my ability to eliminate the unexpected. My brothers crypto-schizophrenic reversal is ever in my mind in this regard. I believe we are dealing with something to which no vagueness or uncertainty of inner dynamics adheres.

Careful thought and study can eliminate the possibility of the contact phenomenon suddenly "turning on us" or otherwise behaving unexpectedly.

The right approach to these things remains elusive. Again and again the "inner voice" of the phenomenon has insisted that since my brother's opus of hyper-carbolation nothing at all remains to be done, and that if something is required in the way of activity, then by virtue of the very nature of the contact, that something will be precisely what we are doing. Ev and I lived quietly at La Chorrera from August until mid-November of 1971. There were moments of frequent high hilarity. And during that time I was able to completely indulge my submersion in the interior processes that I was experiencing. My days were filled with long, thoughtful walks on the trails around La Chorrera and by hours crouched over the tablets of graph paper that I had brought with me. There in the center of the Amazon greenery I elaborated my theories of time and covered sheet after sheet of paper with my wave mechanical fantasies. When not reading or daydreaming, Ev and I indulged ourselves in long conversations in which the new view of being in the world seemed almost within reach.

During this second residency at La Chorrera, the theme of oo-koo-he recurred. We made the acquaintance of several of the Witoto people who regularly walked the path near our own hut, which was a few hundred yards down the same trail where the original experiment had taken place. Among those Witoto who stopped to exchange a word or watch me collecting insects was a st.u.r.dy older man named Demetrius. He was a cloudy- eyed old weasel who positively exuded the stench of the cosmic gatekeeper. In my excited

state of mind, the letters D, M, T seemed to stand out in his name like a beacon. As soon as I could get him alone I haltingly put the question to him.

"Oo-koo-he?"

"Oo-koo-he!" He was barely able to believe his ears. It must have been incredible to him that this strange, weak creature, like something from another world, should directly inquire after a secret tradition of his people. I have no idea how many cultural conventions were overlooked, but after a bit more conversation, or what pa.s.ses for conversation between people who share no common language, I was sure that he would try to help me. Days later, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I was brought a tarry goo wrapped into little leaf packets. I was never able to obtain a hallucinogenic experience from this material, but later a.n.a.lysis by the chemists of the Karolinska Inst.i.tute in Stockholm confirmed the presence of di-methyltryptamine. Demetrius had been as good as his name.

The important thing about the second trip to La Chorrera was that the teaching of the Logos was more or less continuous. And what it taught during those months and afterward was an idea about time. It is an idea that is very concrete and has mathematical rigor. The Logos taught me how to do something with the / Ching that perhaps no one knew how to do before. Perhaps the Chinese knew how to do it once and then lost it thousands of years ago. It taught me a hyper-temporal way of seeing. My books, my public life, my private dreams have all become a part of the effort to feel and understand the new time that was revealed at La Chorrera. A revolution in human understanding is not something that can be corralled within the confines of a conversation. This new model of time enables one to have as much of a certain kind of knowledge about the future as it is possible to have. The future is not absolutely determined; there is not, in other words, a future to "see" in which every event has already been determined.

That isn't how the universe is put together. The future is not yet completed, but it is conditioned. Mysteriously, out of the set of all possible events, certain events are selected, in Whitehead's phrase, to undergo the formality of actually occurring. The Logos was concerned to reveal the mechanics of this process and did reveal it as the idea of the timewave.